Boy, the clichés about the head coaches will be coming hot and heavy for this week’s Georgia-Ole Miss game. All hot seat, all the time. Punditry is so creative, y’all!

If there’s a difference between the two, it’s that Mark Richt is riding a small amount of momentum into the game, so he talks about his Dawgs getting better. Meanwhile the debacle in Nashville has left the Nuttster channeling his inner Ben Franklin. He’s measuring rope.

“I know a lot of (our players) are down,” Nutt said. “They still have a tremendous amount of hope. They believe in this team. They’ll bounce back.

“What I’ve done is the past is really just hunker down with your coaches, your players. You hang on the rope together. You tie a knot on the rope together and hang on it together and believe in it that there will be some good things to happen to us.”

Let’s hope they’re both singing the same tunes late Saturday afternoon.

Leach could be a great hire in Oxford. Fits in well with the Rebel mindset. However, it’s not like Houston Nutt is a bad coach. He won at Arkansas. Ole Miss destroyed a good thing when they got too big for their britches and canned David Cutcliffe. Now they’re reaping the benefits of a lack of perspective. Cautionary tale, really.

UGA fans should take a look in the mirror on this issue, us running CMR out of town would be more catastrophic than Old Miss thinking they could do better than Cutcliffe. They do have serious problems in Oxford now as they have lost the in-state, high ground to MSU.

Or we could look at the cautionary tales of BCS championships following coaching changes at Florida, LSU, Alabama, and Auburn in the last five years. Sure, there are risks in making a change and in hindsight some teams make mistakes, but let’s not ignore the upside, too.

Yes, let’s let the season play out and hope for a better product. But these “it could be worse” arguments drive me crazy. Following this same cautionary tale, Coach Goff would still be shaking his head between the hedges.

Oh, and we’re not Ole Miss. I hope your expectations for our program are slightly higher given our resource advantages at every level.

No, we’re Georgia. And we currently have the second most successful head coach in the history of the University of Georgia’s program. Minus the run of Herschel Walker, he has taken the program to heights which it has never before seen. The parallel between Georgia and Ole Miss in this case is that fans of both programs have a sense of entitlement which is not borne out of past results.

The comparison between Richt and Goff is apt in the sense that they’ve both had two bad years in a row (I just can’t consider 2008 “bad”, though it was “disappointing”). However, the comparison breaks down when you consider that Richt has successes to go along with the failures on his resume. Goff only has 1992, and a failure to follow up on it.

I once thought this, too, but if I think of it as:
1. 0-31 at half time Between the Hedges
2. getting blownout in Jax
3. losing at home to Tech
All in one season? that pretty much qualifies as “bad” no matter how many wins come along with it.

Stoopnagle, I hear you, buddy. And, I’m not as staunchly behind Richt as I was before I saw that fine example of preparedness against Boise State. But, the fact remains that he was the right man for the job in the first half of the decade, and given a few bounces here or there, we’d have gone even higher in those years. I’m gonna see where we are at the end of the year, that’s all.

Quote Of The Day

“I’m thrilled for this day to get here, and I’m excited to find out how a lot of these new guys learn. These practices are not easy, and the idea is to create adversity for your team and find out who your leaders are.” — Kirby Smart, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 8/1/17